My team and I are engineers/scientists who are passionate about sustainable agriculture, keep bees and have been helping local beekeepers monitor the health and behaviors of their bees -- we’ve created something like a heart monitor for beehives called EyesOnHives and we have a version that's now working on a Raspberry Pi!

The device leverages a pretty interesting image processing algorithm but is simple and non-invasive for the sake of the bees. When placed a few feet from a hive entrance, it tracks activity all day, every day while reporting whether the colony is healthy (or not) based on the bees’ activity signature, and analytics running on our servers.

In the EyesOnHives app, beekeepers can view videos of their bees, get alerts on trending activity and share data+video with friends, family and other beekeepers.

We’ve been running a pilot with 15+ hives and so far beekeepers have told us that EyesOnHives helped them rescue colonies affected by ant infestation, robbing and queenlessness - which we’re really happy about!

Thanks for your question NewbiePiUser - that's one of the key ideas that we worked through.

This system is outside the hive - it looks at the bees flying in front of the hive to track their activity, and provides video and data feedback to a beekeeper through their smartphone. No worries about putting things in the hive, and getting caught in that sticky situation covered in propolis!

Thanks so much for the link Dougie, we hadn't yet seen Dave's project, we'll send a note and introduce ourselves. We actually started out with a pretty similar approach, and ran in to similar challenges before we figured out what would work.

Cheers!

DougieLawson wrote:Have you thought about working with Dave Spice from the Raspberry Pi foundation? He's got his own beekeeper's project.